31 Empty Spools

Empty Spools

By Becky Brown

Empty Spools can remind us of the early months of the war when women set aside their sewing to cut up textiles for lint and bandages. After reports of the first bloody battle at Manassas/Bull Run, women North and South had a heartfelt need to contribute.

Sallie Brock Putnam, thirty years old, was living at her parents' home in Richmond. With two brothers who were doctors in the Confederate Army advising her, she organized friends to provide medical supplies for the Confederacy. Supplies included bandages, clothing, bedding and lint.

"Our women for a time suspended the busy operations of the needle, and set aside the more expeditious and labor-saving sewing machine, to apply themselves more industriously to the preparation of lint, the rolling of bandages, and the many other nameless necessaries which the signs of the times made apparent would soon be in requisition of the unfortunates which the chances of battle would send among us mutilated and helpless. No longer the sempstress, every woman of Richmond began to prepare herself for the more difficult and responsible duties of the nurse."

A hospital near Manassus, Virginia in 1862

Library of Congress

In 1861 Peterson's Magazine advised women to deconstruct linen textiles to make lint.

"Lint should be made of unraveled linen, new or old (the latter preferred), by cutting it in pieces of four or five inches square, which would be highly acceptable, while lint made from canton [cotton] flannel is irritating to the wound.”

Women on both sides abandoned their sewing baskets to participate in a "lint and bandage" mania, as Northerner Mary Livermore described it after the War.

"For a time it was the all-absorbing topic... 'What is the best material for lint?' 'How is it best scraped and prepared?' ... Every household gave its leisure time to scraping lint and rolling bandages, till the mighty accumulations compelled the ordering of a halt."

Doctors believed packing a wound with lint scraped (actually more raveled than scraped) from cotton or linen was an effective treatment method, although our contemporary ideas about infection consider the idea of packing thread into a wound unwise.

The pattern is BlockBase #2350, a variation of a block called Spools by the Ladies Art Company about 1900. Today people tend to call this design Empty Spools, an appropriate pattern to recall the ladies of Richmond who turned from their needles to nursing.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 1 dark square 9-1/4" for the spool. Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts. You need 2 dark triangles.

B -Cut 2 light strips 9-1/4" x 2-1/2". Cut 45 degree angles off the edges as shown or use the template in the PDF. Click here:
http://www.barbarabrackman.com/31EmptySpools.pdf
NEW LINK (as of 9/1/2011)
https://acrobat.com/#d=kGTumHNuNPkQSPlKFeBrQA 

C- Cut 1 dark square 5-1/4" for the spool. Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts. You need 2 dark triangles.

Becky, the pattern tester writes:

"I sewed C to B, and THEN cut the 45 degree angles off B.  (C must be centered on B.)"

Here's how I'd have done it.

Read more about scraping lint during the war by Virginia Mescher in this PDF file Lint & Charpie: It's Not Your Dryer Lint.

http://www.raggedsoldier.com/lint.pdf

And read more about Sallie Brock here:

http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Brock_Sarah_Ann_1831-1911 

  

Richmond During the War: Four Years of Personal Observation by Sallie Brock Putnam, Virginia Scharff, editor. (Reprinted in 1996 by the University of Nebraska Press). The book was first published in 1867 so you can read it at Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=S3wVAQAAMAAJ&pg=PR5&dq=richmond+during+the+war&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

Winslow Homer

Harper's Weekly

June, 1861

After the lint craze subsided, women went back to sewing clothing and bedding. Note the cockade on the woman in the left forefront who is making a jacket and wearing a hat.